I am trying to install Suse Linux Pro 9.0 on my new HP computer. I get to the partition part and it can't find my hard disk and it tells me to check my hardware. I have no clue about that. So I thought that it needed a partition to put it in first so I used Norton Partition Magic to create a K drive. Still nothing. I try to install it manually and it still does not see the hard drive. It gives me a place to address it but i don't know what to put in the space. I am thinking that the software is not up the the new computer yet. Any ideas?
Thanks, Warren

Is Suse linux 9.2 a free downloadable program? It might fix it.

Welcome to LQ. First question - are you trying to dual boot, or is this a pure Linux installation? From the sounds of it, what may be happening is that the entire hard drive has already been allocated to XP, and thus there is no available disk space to give to Linux. To illustrate, suppose you had an 80G drive, and maybe you want to give 50G to XP and 30G to Linux. If you run fdisk and see that the entire drive is already allocated to XP, then what you would need to do is resize the XP partition down to 50G and thus create 30G of unallocated, unpartitioned free space which would then be given to Linux. (Note that this is an entirely different thing than how much unused space you have within the XP partition. To say it another way, there is a huge difference between unused space within a partition and unallocated/unpartitioned space on a disk, and what you want for a Linux installation is the latter.)

Sorry if this is stuff you already know, but given the reference to creating a K:\ drive, it appears that your system may have its entire hard drive already given to Windows. -- J.W.

What you are saying sounds logical. I will look at it through Partition Majic and see if it makes more sence. I have an XP media adition computer which has a place partitioned for some of the main componants of windows. I believe it was done that way so that the computer can be used while rendering a video with no problems. How would you reallocated the space? I think you are on to something.
Thanks, Warren

If you already have a reasonably recent version of Partition Magic, I believe it can handle resizing an NTFS partition (which is the file system that XP uses). What I would recommend would be to do a defrag first in order to try to free up as much contiguous disk space as possible, then run Partition Magic. Note also that because any work on existing partitions could be risky, I'd also advise backing up any important data before doing anything.

One alternative to Partition Magic is BootIT NG which I consider to be an excellent utility. Regardless of which tool you use however, the end goal would be to divide your hard drive into a "Windows section" (using the NTFS file system) and a "Linux section" (using the reiserfs or ext3 file system). Dual booting is a *very* common topic here, and there are a lot of existing threads which go into a lot of detail on how to handle the partitioning aspect of it.

Good luck with it -- J.W.

I went back to Partition Magic and deleted my K drive that I had created. Then I repartitioned it again as 10 gigs on my 160 gig drive. I made sure it was a file type that was set up to except Linux. After it was set up and rebooted, I tried to install linux again. (I defragged about a week ago)
The install still said, "No Hard Disk Detected". Then it said, " Check your hardware". That is what I have been getting before. Last night I download Linux 9.1 so I am going to try that. This Partition Magic is the newest one. Thanks for the help so far. If you more ideas I am still working with it.
Thanks, Warren

So what do you have for hardware? A SATA hard drive? Not all distros support SATA out of the box and I'm not sure which ones do.

Hi, I have a related question to this but not sure there re already answers out there:
My old windows-computer broke but the separately linux-installed drive is ok. When I connect it as slave to my new PC I managed to boot the old linux drive (Fedoro Core2) using the rescue CD rom from the iso-site where I downloaded from. When I manage to log in as root by chroot sysadmin running anaconda I can view all my old linux tree in text mode. The question is "What do I do next to configure my old linux drive to run in my new PC?". I know I must recompile the kernel to suit my new hardware as well as set up the bootloader but I am not sure how to do it properly in non-graphical mode. Are there caveats I shd watch out for. Thanks for any pointers (or references to other successes).

Word of advice save time, effort, and energy one simple way. reinstall linux so that pretty much out of the box so to speak you are ready to rumble. That is what I would personally do. Trust me on this one that holds true for any OS as well.. Unless it is going into a duplicate system you don't bother because dependency issues could definitly arise.

michaelk
I have an HP_PAVILION 160 gig, Samsung SP1614C with an NTFS file system. That is what I think I have. My Windows is Xp Media addition. I am thinking that the computer is newer than the Linux version that I have. Isthat likely?
Thanks, Warren

I am having the same "No Hard Disk Detected" issue with the same type of drive.
Is this possibly a driver issue? If so, where can I get driver for the SP1614C?
There are no partitions on the drive and suse linux 9.0 does not find it. Looking
through the driver list it is not listed.